[Modern History] Guns Condoms and Electricity

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Flavius Aetass: Mar 30, 2011

Welcome to the C-SPAM modern history thread!

We'd merged the ancient history thread with the general history thread a while ago, but have found that it's hard to mesh talk of Stalin with talk of Julius Caesar and his proclivity toward sucking off his straight centurions. I figured it would be best to separate the two topics again for the benefit of everyone.

"Modern" history can mean a lot of different things to different people. Early modern history basically begins with Columbus discovering America and this definition imo is necessarily Euro-centric because of how many world-changing developments were taking place as a result of colonization. I'd like to leave that period to the other other thread, which I will rename as pre-modern history.

This thread should be about modern history roughly beginning at the end of the Napoleonic period, that is, 1815. After this period we get a lot of philosophical and technological developments that directly inform the 20th century and thus our contemporary world.

# ¿ Feb 1, 2021 16:10

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 15:31

Flavius Aetass: Mar 30, 2011

Wanted to start this thread off with something interesting.

So the Taiping Rebellion was this massive civil war that happened in China from 1850 to 1864, around the same time as the US Civil War but much, much bigger. Around 20�30 million people died, which is over 10 times as many as in the US.

To sum up the origins, the Qing dynasty of foreign Manchu conquerors had ruled over the Han people and other ethnicities of China since 1644. Among the typical degradations, they made the Chinese wear their hair in a queue with the front shaved (rather than the traditional Chinese long hair with topknot) under penalty of beheading:

In the decades preceding the rebellion there were a lot of disasters in China, both natural and political, especially the hugely unfair concessions and reparations made to Western countries after losing the First Opium War in 1842.

Eventually a young man named Hong Xiuquan became the leader of a group of bandits in southern China, which grew into a huge anti-Manchu rebellion where territory was taken and maintained, and full-scale war existed between the two groups and entire cities were massacred by both sides. Battles were extremely bloody affairs, with huge armies of muskets, spears, and swords clashing into each other.

What's so interesting about this rebellion, you ask-- well, Hong Xiuquan declared himself to be the younger brother of Jesus, that is, Jesus Christ of Christian fame. Hong did not know a whole lot about the Bible, nor did his followers, but they knew enough to establish what would be known as the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, of which Hong was the king by divine right.

This was of interest to Westerners. As of 1850 the openly anti-foreign Xianfeng Emperor ruled in Beijing, and resistance to European-based "free trade" was at an all-time high. Suddenly they're hearing that nearly half of China is ruled by a Christian? This could be an opportunity...

# ¿ Feb 1, 2021 16:42

Flavius Aetass: Mar 30, 2011

I don't imagine most high school history teachers would even want to go into modern stuff considering how many parents would raise hell about how it's taught

# ¿ Feb 22, 2021 15:07

Flavius Aetass: Mar 30, 2011

Proclamation (c. 1828�30) by Sir George Arthur to Aboriginal Tasmanians, claiming that they would receive equal treatment before the law.

The British colonial government made some attempts to make this a reality but in the end the native Tasmanians were almost entirely killed off by disease and "settler-involved shootings."

# ¿ Feb 22, 2021 23:05